I was going to write a Facebook post or a brief tweet about all of the things I’ve been up to this year, but then I realised that professionally, 2017 has been one of the most exciting and varied years of my life – so much has happened that, looking back, I can’t believe it’s my life. Two years ago I was a respectable, happy primary school teacher and now, in the space of one year, I’ve been to Argentina, Brazil, Texas and Orlando for work as well as NYC for holiday and various parts of the UK and Brussels for an award nomination! What a rollercoaster.
TL;DR : I’ve had an AMAZING year
January
By January, I finally felt settled into my role at pi-top, I’d begun working on some pi-top events for a couple of charities BECSlink and IntoUniversity and having lots of fun with the ever-growing staff. I managed to squeeze in visiting the London Python Dojo at Sohonet where I finally met Drew Buddie IRL and the two of us chatted to all the attendees about the teaching of coding as well as getting a better understanding of how a Python Dojo works.
I attended BETT for the first time as an exhibitor, which was kind of exciting – I got to meet so many people IRL and, because everyone knew where to find me, I probably met more people than I would’ve had I just been visiting the show. I was expecting to be exhausted by the end of the week and, although I was pretty tired by Saturday, I was also still super-excited to see so many lovely people in attendance and I can’t wait for this year. I also attended the BETT awards with pi-top where we won the ‘start-up of the year award’ – I was really pleased with this as I had been involved in writing the application and so it was great fun getting all dressed-up with the company founders and getting up on stage to accept the award. pi-top are shortlisted for another two awards this year so fingers crossed we get to win again!!
February
February saw my first Coding Evening of 2017 – we’ve managed to host one per half term since I started running them in 2014 and I’m still having lots of fun and meeting new people each time!
At pi-top, February also saw the first Champions weekend – I got to take most of the lovely people that I’d selected to be pi-topCHAMPIONS to Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing for a two-day bonding and training session. Not only did we get great feedback, we also had an amazing time. It proved to be a great weekend all around and I was reminded once again how lucky I am to have so many wonderful people in my life.
On a personal note, February saw me taking up running properly for the first time in my life – I’ve just checked and have managed to clock up just shy of 300km this year which is pretty impressive for someone who has always hated running!
March
March began with the pi-birthday, what a fabulous event that was – from unicorn face paints, to pi-brewed beers, it was great fun. I managed a talk and panel at the event in spite of a nightmare cold and got to meet a host of wonderful people – from the young up and coming coders in the pi-youth community to some wonderful adults organising events and supporting children around the world (I’m looking at you Mr Provenzano). It was also great fun catching up with the Pimoroni pirates and long-time community members like Alex Eames again and we managed to squeeze in a giant meal at a local restaurant after one of the nights.
March also saw another Coding Evening and I also got to visit one of the schools in the group I used to work for as a teacher to deliver a workshop as part of their STEM day. As part of my work for Crossover Solutions, I visited a school in Amesbury to run a Physical Computing workshop and had lots of fun!
April
I’m really lucky that I know so many wonderful people in the Raspberry Pi community and so I was really pleased to be invited to help out at PiWars 2017 in Cambridge – I was invited to help judge the event and so I headed up for a weekend of fun. I have to admit that PiWars was a HUGE highlight for me in 2017 – I always burble about how great the Raspberry pi community is, but this is the event that really shows this off. Lots of fans coming together to compete, but with no malice or anger, just lots of support and fun. Even the people who did badly left smiling and so I’m really exciting this year to have bullied some of my colleagues at pi-top to help me enter a team! I can’t wait to see how we get along!
April also saw me attending a lovely little event in Malvern called ATI and running pi-top workshops in schools in Eastbourne. Albert Hickey and I also managed to squeeze in a third Wimbledon Raspberry Jam which was a hugely successful event including talks by students, teachers and community members as well as workshops run by young people and involving LOTS of glitter.
I also started some work for Crossover Solutions teaching for half a day every other week in a local school in Wandsworth which has been great for keeping my finger on the pulse of CS teaching!
No surprises that it was another busy month.
May
In May, I built my Pimoroni Mood Lamp and really honed my soldering skills- turns out, I’m quite good at soldering!
I met with Alasdair Davies and Francisco Coutinho Gouveia at London Zoo so we could talk about the amazing coding and conservation activities they’re getting up to on the island of Principe – in the last few weeks, Alasdair has been receiving footage from the turtles that are currently ‘wearing’ Raspberry Pi cameras and it’s hypnotic stuff.
May saw me visit Cornwall again to do some work for the National STEM Centre as a roving Scratch roadshow as well as visiting Bank of America to help them run an amazing pi-top workshop for children of their staff!
June
June was a whirlwind month – I managed to fit in performing in an amateur performance of Blithe Spirit as Edith the maid, a Coding Evening at the Library Pot in Richmond AND a trip to San Antonio, Texas for ISTE (the US equivalent of BETT).
July
I’m still not sure how I survived July – I was meant to be going to Brazil for two weeks to run some coding workshops for teachers, but somehow, before I knew it, I was booked to spend the week before in Argentina for pi-top!! I got to attend the first Code Club festival in Horsham but had to leave at lunch time so I could head back to Heathrow for my flights to Buenos Aires.
I can’t get over how much of an amazing three weeks I had in South America and I’m very excited about heading back to São Paulo in two weeks for some more training with Maple Bear!
I spent my birthday in Brazil so it was a great relief to finally come home and relax a bit in August.
August
On the first of August, pi-top moved offices from a very ‘start-up’ office in Bethnal Green, to a much more professional looking office in Old Street – it was a very exciting move for all of us and has been great fun! The only problem with the new office is that it’s much too close to too many lovely eating places!
At the beginning of August, Stuart, Kirk and I managed to build my Google AIY (or ‘Boxy’ as Kirk renamed it), which was great fun!
On a personal note, in August, we managed to sneak away for a few days with my nieces (aged 7 and 4 at the time) and had a little escape to the country visiting both Longleat and Stourhead House and I directed a rehearsed reading of a play, which I’m now going to be directing in April in Kew!
At the end of August, I decided to see if any of my pi-top colleagues fancied playing a few board games after work and thus ‘board games nights’ were launched at pi-top with a games night occurring every couple of weeks (and occasionally twice in one week). I have to admit to being really pleased with how this has worked out as there seems to be at least 6 people each time and occasionally as many as 12 and, while there are a few ‘core’ gamers, the attendance has been quite varied, allowing a greater variety of people to hang out and spend time together – great team building!
September
Having missed the first pi-top social in July as I was in Brazil, I was pretty excited to organise a second one – karaoke night in the local pub… unfortunately, I’m not sure my colleagues would appreciate me sharing details of the event on social media, but let’s just say that it was a FABULOUS night and I hadn’t realised that I worked with such an amazingly ‘talented’ bunch of people 🙂
I’d love to pretend that September was a peaceful month, but with everything building up for October, there was nothing quiet about it – between a Code Club event at Monzo, beginning our PiWars project, organising a Coding Evening and attending the ArtsRichmond Swan Awards for drama and musicals, it was another crazy, but exciting month.
Also in September, I had an article published in issue three of Hello World magazine – thanks to my earlier meeting with Francisco, I had developed an interest in teaching coding to pupils who don’t speak English as their first language so, while I was in Brazil, I wrote a piece for the magazine and was really excited to see it published.
I finally put all of my running practice to the test in September by running my first 10km in Kew Gardens, finishing in just over one hour and 8 minutes.
October
At the beginning of October, I finally took a real holiday and Stuart and I headed off to NYC for a week – we got back just in time for pi-top to launch the new pi-top with Inventor’s Kit, which had kept me busy for most of September. It was an amazing achievement to have been involved in such a great product and I really feel proud to have been part of the team.
This month also saw me being featured in the MagPi magazine on their community profile – thank you for writing lovely things about me Alex, it was a real honour.
October also saw me ‘popping’ over to Orlando for a few days to attend an event called Project Lead the Way, but, more importantly, to spend some time with John Sperry, my US counterpart along with pi-top‘s new education guru, Graham Brown-Martin.
When I landed back in the UK, I had to immediately jump in my car and drive to Cardiff as I’d been invited by the RPF to help out at Picademy as part of PyconUK. PyconUK was a really wonderful event this year and I’d like to thank everyone who was so supportive of my talk about mental health – this was a bold new step for me and I really hope I get the opportunity to talk more about it in 2018.
Also at Pycon, I was presented with a John Pinner award for service to the Python community which was overwhelming and amazing and I was so honoured to be one of the first recipients (along with quite a few familiar faces including both Tim Golden and Josh Lowe!)
I got to catch up with some many amazing people at Pycon – you read my write up here.
November
I thought that November had brought an end to my travels, so it was surprising to learn that I’d been shortlisted for an Ada Award for European Digital Woman of the year, meaning I had to go to Brussels for an overnight stay. Although I didn’t win, it was an incredible honour to be shortlisted and to spend some time with some wonderful people, especially Danny and Helena, as well as one of my favourites, Iseult and her wonderful daughter Aoibheann – what a fab couple of days!
November saw another Coding Evening and a trip to the V3 Tech Awards, which pi-top were shortlisted for as well as a visit to Merton Council to talk about ways to support the local community and youth clubs with pi-top.
December
December has been a wonderful month with Christmas parties, event planning and meetings about some exciting stuff next year. Thankfully there were no trips abroad, just to visit family in Cornwall and Lincoln and I’ve finally been able to relax a little bit.
Next year is already looking exciting with trips to Brazil, Dubai and Chicago already in the diary – I’m directing a play with auditions in 10 days and a house-move may even be on the cards later in the year (fingers crossed – five years in a one bedroom flat is my limit when the pair of us have so much stuff).
I’m really looking forward to attending BETT with pi-top as we have some great things planned and I’m confident that 2018 is going to be another amazing year. I still can’t get over how much my life has changed in the last 18 months.
Cat Lamin 